Going by Krishi Bhawan’s assessment, it appears that agriculture in eastern India has finally turned the corner, and the region is now food-surplus. The east, despite its enormous potential for agricultural growth, had remained unaffected by the green revolution — largely due to sustained apathy from the Centre and lack of enterprise on the part of its state governments. There has, however, been a visible change in recent years; the Centre seems to have realised that the second green revolution has to come from the east (Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and east Uttar Pradesh) and the states have got their act together. As a result, rice output in this region surged to over 56.2 million tonnes in 2010-11, which is more than half of the country’s total rice harvest of 96 million tonnes. Overall foodgrain production in eastern India, too, grew by around 12 per cent, against an all-India increase of only 2.2 per cent.
Eastern India is liberally endowed with natural resources — deep fertile topsoil, copious water and plentiful sunlight. These have been capitalised upon only sparingly. This zone, for instance, possesses nearly 46 per cent of the country’s entire water resources but uses only three per cent of that for crop irrigation. Recent initiatives have sought to correct this anomaly by incentivising the construction of dug wells, shallow tubewells and water ponds for irrigating crops. Besides, the farmers have been exposed to modern technology, new high-yielding seeds and other yield-enhancing crop inputs.
This welcome transformation of the east from being a food-deficit to a food-surplus region, even if only in its early stages, has major implications for agriculture in those other parts of the country hitherto producing surplus food for the central grain kitty. Most significantly, the north-western zone (Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh), geographically not ideal for growing high-volume low-value commodities like wheat and rice, can now switch over to relatively more lucrative low-volume high-value crops. This shift is also vital for conserving this region’s dwindling water reserves. Even some southern states, including Andhra Pradesh where the farmers recently observed a “crop holiday” to draw attention to the unprofitability of cultivating paddy, can now divert part of their land to cash crops for better returns. But this will require the Centre to revisit agricultural pricing policies that have till now been tilted heavily in favour of wheat and rice at the cost of other likely crops — such as pulses, oilseeds, vegetables and fruit, all of which are in short supply. The sooner this policy shift takes place, the better it will be for balanced agricultural growth in India.
